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AMD Opteron processors will be available as an option on Cray XD1(TM)
supercomputers in July 2005, and on Cray XT3(TM) supercomputers later in 2005.
Dual-core processors allow Cray to achieve very high density in both the Cray
XD1 and Cray XT3 supercomputers. One Cray XD1 cabinet provides 288 AMD Opteron
200 Series processor cores, boosting its computing capability from the 744
gigaflops available with single-core processors to more than 1.2 teraflops.

IBM announced strong support for Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors in the
IBM eServer and IntelliStation product lines with the introduction of a more
robust, powerful workstation, the IntelliStation A Pro 6217. IBM also announced
today that the IBM eServer 326 high-performance 1U server line will be expanded
to include the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors. In 2003, IBM was the first tier
one OEM to introduce AMD Opteron support with their server and workstation line.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. introduced its first dual-core server based on the new
industry-standard Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processor, and announced dual-core
for its entire x64 product line. The Sun Fire(TM) V40z server powered by AMD64
dual-core technology, is an enhanced 4-socket, 8-way server that integrates four
microprocessors — each with two complete CPU cores. The 8-way, SMP server
powered by the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 875 (2.2GHz) can support
both 32-bit and 64-bit applications simultaneously with full compatibility
between modes.

Cray to Offer Supercomputers With Dual-Core AMD Opteron
Processors

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that Dual-Core AMD
Opteron(TM) processors will be available as an option on Cray XD1(TM)
supercomputers in July 2005, and on Cray XT3(TM) supercomputers later in 2005.
AMD’s cutting-edge 32- and 64-bit dual-core technology fits two processor cores
on a single die, giving users of these Cray systems double the processing
capacity in the same amount of space with minimal increases in power consumption
and heat levels.

Direct-connect system architectures of the Cray XD1 system and the Cray XT3
system speed high-performance computing (HPC) applications by directly linking
processors, memory and I/O resources instead of using a conventional PCI bus.
These architectures ensure that sophisticated software can take full advantage
of all the available processing power as more processors are added to the
system.

"With our strong collaboration with AMD, we have already performed successful
early testing of the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors on the Cray XD1 system on
a range of applications and are excited to be rolling them out to our
customers," said Cray president Peter Ungaro. "All of our Cray supercomputers,
including the Cray XD1 and Cray XT3 systems, were designed to accommodate higher
density dual-core processors in order to leverage our customers’ investment in
these systems. As a result, customers who choose the dual-core option will enjoy
improved price/performance, while continuing to see exceptional sustained
application performance without the need to modify their applications."

"Cray has helped prepare the way for the next stage in processor evolution by
designing the Cray XD1 and the Cray XT3 supercomputers to take advantage of
Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor performance," said Ben Williams, vice president
of Commercial and Server/Workstation business at AMD. "As dual-core AMD64
technology is also based on AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture, it continues to
eliminate processor, memory and I/O bottlenecks, while enhancing overall
performance for HPC applications."

Dual-core processors allow Cray to achieve very high density in both the Cray
XD1 and Cray XT3 supercomputers. One Cray XD1 cabinet provides 288 AMD Opteron
200 Series processor cores, boosting its computing capability from the 744
gigaflops (744 billion calculations per second) available with single-core
processors to more than 1.2 teraflops. The Cray XT3 supercomputer, based on the
Sandia Red Storm massively parallel processor (MPP) system design, can operate
with more than 60,000 processor cores — delivering up to 269 teraflops (269
trillion FLOPS), an increase of 109 teraflops over single-core devices. The
10,000 processor Cray XT3 supercomputer installed at Sandia National
Laboratories is the largest Opteron processor-based system in the world.

IBM Leads Support of Dual-Core AMD Opteron Processor With
New IntelliStation A Pro

IBM today announced strong support for Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors
in the IBM eServer and IntelliStation product lines with the introduction of a
more robust, powerful workstation, the IntelliStation A Pro 6217.

IBM also announced today that the IBM eServer 326 high-performance 1U server
line will be expanded to include the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors. In 2003,
IBM was the first tier one OEM to introduce AMD Opteron support with their
server and workstation line.

One of the first workstations on the market to feature AMD’s new Dual-Core AMD
Opteron processor Model 275, the A Pro 6217 was designed with many of the
reliable, innovative features of the IBM eServer xSeries.

IBM customers are using the IntelliStation series in diverse fields like
engineering and digital content creation to facilitate tasks such as product
design, movie production, chemical and petroleum, and chip manufacturing. One
such customer is Santa Monica-based Luminetik Animation Studios, a 3D Animation
and Visual Effects House.

Luminetik conducted extensive tests and found that the IBM IntelliStation A Pro
delivered the highest quality image and solved every complex production issue
the company faced, freeing up valuable time for its artists. In fact,
IntelliStation allowed Luminetik to increase rendering speeds up to 1400 percent
for very large projects.

"With the AMD Opteron architecture, IntelliStation drops render times so
significantly, it gives Luminetik artists the freedom to create without fear of
technology limitations," said Akiko Ashley, principal at Luminetik Animation
Studios. "I’m very eager to begin work with the new A Pro. I am looking forward
to seeing what sort of performance gains we get, particularly with the rendering
applications which are multithreaded, providing us the maximum performance boost
from dual core."

"AMD64 dual-core technology builds on the already strong value proposition our
standards-based IntelliStation workstation provides to customers," said Bob
Lenard, director, IntelliStation product line, IBM Systems and Technology Group.
"Besides the addition of dual core, IBM engineered the new A Pro to be faster,
more agile, cooler and quieter with more graphical ability, allowing the
performance and reliability levels that IBM continuously meets to remain at the
highest level. Our customers have helped us shape this product by telling us
what technology features they require to advance their businesses to the next
level and we have responded."

"IBM demonstrated its confidence in AMD64 technology as the first tier one
vendor to bring AMD Opteron processor-based systems to the market two years ago.
Today IBM is delivering even more processing muscle to customers with a new
workstation powered by the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor," said Marty Seyer,
corporate vice president and general manager, Microprocessor Business Unit,
Computation Products Group, AMD. "As IBM expands its AMD64 family of solutions,
customers can tap into the inherent time-to-market advantage of AMD’s dual-core
technology, as well as its multi-tasking and multithreaded capabilities ideally
suited for datacenter and data-intensive workstation applications."

IntelliStation features lead the pack

IBM was the first tier one vendor to introduce AMD Opteron processors in
workstations, and IBM continues to lead the industry today with the
second-generation A Pro. Leveraging the technology of its award-winning
IntelliStation product, IBM’s new A Pro builds on the AMD64 architecture to
address customer’s multitasking workflow issues and use of multithreaded
applications.

The IntelliStation A Pro 6217 is further demonstration of IBM’s commitment to
provide customers with hardware solutions designed to maximize space and
minimize business disruption. The IntelliStation A Pro’s compact AMD Opteron
processor-based workstation form factor makes it just as convenient to keep on
the desk top as to rack-mount in the datacenter.

The A Pro 6217 features the next generation of PCI Express x16 2D/3D graphics
from NVIDIA® and 3Dlabs® with dual-display support for greater bandwidth and
flexibility. The new extreme 3D graphics from 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm has already
achieved some of the highest benchmark results in the industry.

Other new features of IBM’s IntelliStation A Pro 6217 include:

— support for Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors for up to four-cores per
system;
— advanced system cooling with optimized acoustic design;
— a slim mechanical build;
— and up to 16GB PC3200 ECC memory for the most compute-intensive,
graphic-rich applications.
More information is available at www.ibm.com/intellistation and at www.ibm.com/eserver/opteron.

Pricing and availability

The IBM IntelliStation A Pro 6217 will be preinstalled with Microsoft® Windows®
XP Professional (32-bit) or Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 3 WS (64-bit). The
product will be available to order beginning April 26, 2005 and is planned to be
generally available in June, with pricing starting at $ 3259 in the U.S. The IBM
eServer 326 models with Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors will be orderable in
May, with pricing released at that time.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today introduced its first dual-core server based on
the new industry-standard Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processor, and announced
dual-core for its entire x64 product line. The Sun Fire(TM) V40z server powered
by AMD64 dual-core technology, is an enhanced 4-socket, 8-way server that
integrates four microprocessors — each with two complete CPU cores. The
dual-core architecture is designed to help customers achieve twice the
performance and power efficiency over competitive x64 single-core server
offerings based on Intel processors, resulting in half the operational costs
that include power and cooling — in some cases saving customers an average of
$ 2M annually per year(1).

"Our new dual-core server can deliver double the value to customers for their
hardware investment. In some cases, the Sun Fire V40z servers powered by
dual-core can take up to 60 percent less rack and floor space, require 50
percent less memory, disk space and I/O capacity, and cost less 50 percent less
per node to manage than Xeon MP equivalent servers," said John Fowler, executive
vice president, Network Systems Group for Sun Microsystems, Inc. "In addition,
we’ve already seen great customer traction for our x64 systems. We are the only
major server vendor that has grown AMD Opteron processor factory revenue market
share every quarter since announcing our first server based on the
industry-standard AMD Opteron processor(2)."

Sun Delivers Nearly Twice the Value in One; Outperforms HP and Dell

The Sun Fire V40z server with dual-core is designed to require only 42 percent
of the power needed to support the same number of processor cores in servers
using the Intel XeonMP processors(3), and runs virtually any operating system
(OS), including Solaris(TM), standard Linux distributions or Windows. Sun’s line
of x64 servers equipped with single-core processors are also designed to be
easily upgradeable to Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors which in many cases may
be as simple as replacing the processors and refreshing the BIOS (basic
input/output system).

The Sun Fire V40z server equipped with the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor has
achieved a world-record floating point throughput performance for all 8-way,
x86-compatible systems. With this result the dual-core Sun Fire V40z server
demonstrates more than 2.5X the performance of competitive 4-processor
single-core servers such as the HP ProLiant ML570 G3 and the Dell PowerEdge 6850
equipped with the newest Intel Xeon MP EM64T-capable processor(5). This
benchmark addresses the advantages of the new AMD dual-core technology when
compared to the traditional single-core systems. The results for the most recent
performance claims can be found at: http://www.sun.com/v40z/benchmarks.html .

Additionally, customers will be able to purchase an 8-way server equipped with
the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 875 and 16GB of memory for about the
same price as a 4-way server powered with the single-core AMD Opteron processor
Model 850(4) when it was first introduced last year, for $ 38,995 U.S. list
price. The new dual-core Sun Fire V40z server will be generally available in
May. For more information on the dual-core Sun Fire V40z server please visit:
http://www.sun.com/v40z .

Solaris 10 Uniquely Positioned to Harness the Power of Dual-Core Systems

Sun brings 20 years of Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) systems expertise to the
AMD64 platform and Solaris 10 OS is the third release of the OS designed to
support multi-core systems. Innovative Solaris 10 technologies like Solaris
Containers, Predictive Self Healing and Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), are multi-core
aware and designed to take advantage of the AMD64 architecture, while multi-core
features specific to Solaris on Sun Fire servers such as Memory Placement
Optimization (MPO) and scheduler enhancements are also supported. For example,
Predictive Self-Healing allows users to automatically detect failing cores and
take them offline without taking the entire CPU offline or affecting application
availability. Customers can also protect their Solaris investment since all
existing Solaris OS applications can immediately access all the benefits of
multi-core platforms without modification or recompilation.

The combination of Solaris 10 and AMD64 has proven to be a powerful combination
and will allow organizations to unleash the technology’s true performance
potential. To date, Solaris 10 OS has achieved more than 12 record-setting
benchmarks on AMD64 hardware, four of which were based on multi-core systems.
For more information, please reference: http://sun.com/solaris/benchmarks .

"Sun and AMD have collaborated once again to deliver some of the industry’s most
powerful industry-standard servers that take full advantage of AMD64 dual-core
technology," said Marty Seyer, corporate vice president and general manager,
Microprocessor Business Unit, Computation Products Group, AMD. "Our combined
leadership is resulting in significant performance boosts and power efficiencies
in the enterprise data center, as evidenced by these impressive Solaris 10
benchmarks on Sun platforms powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors. AMD64
enables an inherent time-to-market advantage, lower cost of design, reduced
support costs and potentially lower cost of operations advantage. We will
continue to support Sun’s plan for a full x64 product line based on dual-core
AMD64 technology and work together to bring multi-core, 64-bit computing to the
masses."

The 8-way, SMP server powered by the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 875
(2.2GHz) can support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications simultaneously with
full compatibility between modes. The server’s design can help enable faster
computations and lower cost per database transaction, and its high-density form
factor comes in a compact, cost-saving 3U rack, lowering the overall physical
space requirements when compared to competitive 4U equivalents.

"While several competitors have abandoned their plans to build out their x64
product line up to a 16-way, Sun has plans to deliver a product line that
extends up to eight dual-core processors — 16-way performance in a single
system. Over the next year, you’ll see more competitive aggressive moves from us
— and I’m not just talking about dual-core configurations for our Sun Fire V20z
server that is planned for later this summer," Fowler added.